


Babel

by kerlin



Category: Farscape
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-03
Updated: 2010-09-03
Packaged: 2017-10-11 10:37:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,013
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/111509
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kerlin/pseuds/kerlin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are so many language barriers on this ship, so many stumbling blocks of semantics and vocabulary that the translator microbes can't work their way around.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Babel

Chiana’s fingers trail along the edge of the entrance to command, the warmth of the living ship sinking into her fingertips even as her stomach chills at the scene before her.

She looks so fragile, arched over the notebook in her hands as if to protect it. Beyond her, John is silhouetted against the brilliant colors of the nebula, his hand extended as if to conjure the wormhole he senses, humming in his blood. _Soon, very soon._

Aeryn’s fingers touch the word she pronounces. “Exist,” her voice says, hesitantly, and eagerness and despair are both traced in the lines of her body. Her lips purse and she tries again, bringing her head closer to the notebook and then back again. “Exist…ence. Exist_ence_. Existence. Yeah.” A sudden and innocently delighted smile dawns in a moment of pure accomplishment.

Chiana approaches with an almost hesitant smile and looks at the notebook, at symbols that form words that don’t mean much to her except that she knows they are in English and that they mean everything to Aeryn.

“How’s the English?”

“Oh. They start small, they grow and then they change. I don't know—twenty-six symbols, it should be easy.” Aeryn draws a shuddering breath, and it’s clear that she is applying all of her Peacekeeper-learned resolve to this lesson. Aeryn Sun will not be defeated by mere symbols on paper.

Chiana is proud of her for that, in a bittersweet sort of way. She’s still childlike enough to want it all to turn out well but world-wise enough to know that sometimes it just doesn’t. So she jokes, comfortable in this new-found companionship that found its way to her over a guilty admission and a radiation leak.

“Well, they can barely escape their own gravity.”

Aeryn laughs, but it’s with an almost manic edge and over much too quickly. A smile lingers on her lips, though, and Chiana would like to think that it was her joke that put it there, but probably not. Probably Crichton, probably the _other_ Crichton, put that lingering sweetness in her.

Chiana shifts her weight to look out the viewport, at the panorama that Aeryn is carefully not looking at but is obviously drawn to. Makes the obvious observation: “He's been out there a long time.”

Aeryn looks up in a deliberately careless way, and almost as an aside says, “Oh. Yes, he seems to like this particular wormhole for some reason.” But now that she’s looked at him, she can’t tear her eyes away.

Chiana looks again at the symbols on the page and remembers other symbols that made even less sense and frightened her even more - ink marks on skin, John writing and writing. “He’s just learned to speak the language of wormhole.”

Aeryn tries to meet him halfway. “Wormhole” in his own language, a purely linguistic challenge that she purses her lips over, carefully rounding out the syllables on her tongue.

Chiana’s gaze shifts from Crichton to Aeryn, her gray lips pressed together. Concern is reflected in her dark eyes, and she feels a sudden need to make it all better even as she looks at Aeryn’s too-long hair and thinks of secrets and telling the whole story.

“If you want to get him back…that’s not the language you need to learn.” She says it almost without inflection, a hopeless statement, because for some reason Aeryn can’t understand, not yet. Chiana’s not sure she understands either, entirely, what she’s just said. There are so many language barriers on this ship, so many stumbling blocks of semantics and vocabulary that the translator microbes can’t work their way around.

Something swift and fleeting flickers across Aeryn’s face, too fast for interpretation, and Chiana is suddenly tired of swimming through the thick emotional viscosity that surrounds John and Aeryn these days.

She leaves without a sound.

Aeryn leans back, flat against Moya, almost as if drawing strength from the Leviathan while John commands the wormhole. She watches him now, the notebook forgotten in her lap as she thinks about the language of wormholes while John’s fragile human form floats in stark contrast to the blue vortex in front of him. _Fragile, as John Crichton sighs his last ragged breath. “Don’t worry about me.” Always wormholes…_

“Damn, check this puppy out!” His voice is impressed, with more emotion than she’s heard from him in some time. It hurts that he would infuse more caring into a scientific abstraction than into his dealings with her. But this is an abstraction that he has predicted and birthed from his blood, and can to a certain degree understand and control.

Aeryn has long since learned that between her and John nothing can be predicted and very little can be controlled. Once, that had terrified her, and she had run, not realizing that in Aeryn Sun’s life, all paths lead back to John Crichton. And so here she was, having taken her life back from the hands of fate, but still unsure what exactly to do with it.

John Crichton dances with the wormhole, two partners in the void of space, until one takes control. His voice isn’t overly concerned as he comms to Pilot for a pickup. But Aeryn’s posture echoes her worry as she pulls herself up to watch him drift closer to the wormhole. “John?” she asks, because he is after all the expert on these things.

His voice edges into concern after she says his name, and he asks for the docking web, his tone insistent, and Aeryn adds in her own pleas to Pilot and then to D’Argo, though by this point she knows it’s futile: he’s too far away and it will take too long to prep Lo’la.

“D’Argo, you might want to get the ship - ”

John’s panicked voice intercuts her comm to D’Argo, calling one last time to Pilot before he disappears - devoured, literally, by a wormhole.

Aeryn pulls herself forward more when John disappears, almost as if to push herself down the rabbit hole after John, and her last word is flat, stunned.

“ - ready.”


End file.
